Ukraine: 66 posts

It took me a moment to connect the green fragrance reminiscent of jasmine buds and apples with the bunch of willow branches I held in my arms. I bought it at the entrance to the Mgarsky Monastery in Lubny, and I now stood in line to have my willow branches blessed by the priest who walked around the church courtyard, sprinkling people and their willow bouquets with holy water. Since palm trees don’t grow in Ukraine but willows do, the Sunday before Easter is called Willow Sunday. Mine smelled of sweet incense and willow blossoms.

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“One face haunted me for a long time, and I knew that I had to paint it,” says Natalia Satsyk, a Ukrainian artist whose exhibition is currently on display at the St.-Adelbert Abbey in the Dutch town of Egmond-Binnen. The face gazes from her canvases. Sometimes it resembles Congolese masks, elongated and sharply defined. Sometimes it is rendered with bold strokes and dramatic colors. The gender may be obscured, as is the body to which it is attached, and what strikes me the most is the depth of sorrow and the pain I see in its eyes. And also the radiance of hope.

One of the unexpected outcomes of the independence achieved by Ukraine in 1993 is the vibrant art scene. Despite political and economic problems and meager state support, artists gave cities like Lviv, Kyiv and Kharkhiv a vitality they hadn’t experienced since the avant-garde of the 1910s and 1920s, a period that produced works by Kazemir Malevich, David Burliuk, Aleksandra Ekster, and other leading futurists. Satsyk is based in Lviv, a town in the western part of Ukraine, and she’s a part of the new, dynamic movement of young artists who are not afraid to take risks and question conventions.

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I never met my great-grandmother, Olena. At least, not that I recall. My mother says that she brought me to see her, but I must have been only a few months old, and then a year later Olena slipped on a rubber mat and died of a heart attack. The house where she lived was sold.

We are a family short on artifacts and rich on stories. It’s hard to accumulate anything when fate has consigned you to live in a strip of land that sees one invader after another. In Olena’s life she experienced several revolutions, two wars and two famines. My world was turned upside down simply by traveling in the areas of Ukraine touched by war in 2014, so I can’t imagine what it would have been like to live through the kind of hardship that Olena experienced. According to my mother, Olena coped by writing. Cooking and writing.

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I have long held that the owners of perfume boutiques all over the world have more similarities than differences–artistic dispositions, creative personalities and a boundless passion for fragrance. It’s not enough to be a good manager and sales person to run such a specialized enterprise. One needs to inspire visitors to learn new things, to expand their horizons and to step outside their comfort zone. For this, energy and knowledge are essential, but so is passion.

Walk past the fanciful House with Chimaeras, whose dolphins and monsters look as if they are about to tumble down on the guards patrolling the Ukrainian President’s office. Then continue past the former residence of  the ballet dancer Serge Lifar and the pale blue Ivan Franko Theater that looks like a Ladurée pastry. Tucked away nearby is Le Flacon, a boutique run by a team of perfume lovers.

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When our house in Kyiv was finally sold, the arrangements promised to be uncomplicated–sign some papers, make a few visits to the notary and townhall and arrange for a moving truck. Unexpectedly, the latter turned into a source of some discord, because while my mother was of the opinion that whatever the house held should either be sold or discarded, my grandmother was adamant that every last chair and plate must be salvaged. “Think of the fine dinner sets we bought for your wedding,” she pleaded with mom over the phone. “I always disliked those zaftig Madonnas–and we did get divorced.” “But what about your lovely lacquered desk?” “Soviet satellites sure made some clunky furniture in their day.” And on and on it went scrambling the telephone lines over the Atlantic. But one thing they agreed upon was to collect my stepfather’s library and store it at my grandmother’s.

At her house, the books stayed in boxes, because for all of my grandmother’s good intentions, the lack of available space in a house already full to the brim with books made it impossible to find another solution. Every time I visited, I would flip open the lid and glance inside, and one day I couldn’t resist and before long all the boxes were unpacked with books arranged in towering piles on the floor around me.

Of the many things that make us–people, places, experiences–some leave the deepest marks. We’re a mosaic of it all, bits and shards of influences shaping our desires, yearnings and dreams. When I think of my stepfather’s library, I’m conscious of a magnetic pull that the eclectic collection of books had on me, taking me far beyond the intentions of its collector.

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